Originally by:MaslluHi, 1 year ago CCP said that will have an spanish version. What happens with this project?

Nothing, looks like its stalled.Last info was seen here and here, with no further answer.

Looks like the spanish market is not important to CCP, or the translation company is very innefficient (or the aquarium is more important, who knows? )A pitty, really. I'm sure that if they translate it and made a couple of marketing alliances (like selling GTC at El Corte Ingles) the game may have a nice acceptance here in Spain. I'm glad I learned English, really.

My understanding is that CCP have been working on the German and Russian translations until now. The Russian version has had some problems, so that has delayed further translations. CCP has only a small localization team but they seem committed to improving the situation - http://ccpgames.com/jobdetails.aspx?78. So I´m sure a Spanish version is on the way, it´s just going to take some more time.

Originally by:Ben AlamayiMy understanding is that CCP have been working on the German and Russian translations until now. The Russian version has had some problems, so that has delayed further translations. CCP has only a small localization team but they seem committed to improving the situation - http://ccpgames.com/jobdetails.aspx?78. So I´m sure a Spanish version is on the way, it´s just going to take some more time.

I don't get it, really. They just need to prepare the application once using gettext and tell all the programmers to use the needed syntax. Then it's just a matter of exporting the text chains and translating it using poedit or something similar (you can even make a small application to manage the different translation on a database.)Every time you are about to launch a new patch, you export the new chains, translate them and it'll take a day or two to get the new translations. How can that be so complicated?CCP is a company of contrasts, they can launch incredibly complex projects like Ambulation, but they're unable to do simple things like translating the client or managing the forums effectively...

Plans for Spanish localization have changed since the discussions mentioned in this thread occurred. It is now not in our immediate plans to translate the EVE client into Spanish - although our slogan is 'World Domination' so I believe it will come one day.

This is because of lessons we have learned from localizing into Chinese, German and Russian. It is going to take us some time to put these lessons into practice and then we will look to localize into new languages, basing our decisions on which languages to localize into on existing and potential markets.

Also I would like to apologize for lack of replies to this thread previously, it is now part of my job to keep an eye on these forums and respond to any questions you guys might have

Edited by: Disteeler on 20/09/2008 11:03:38And why can't the community make their own translations via some development tool to change the .stuff files? why don't you Open(tm) that piece of EvE? have you considered this option?

It's a shame you are doing translations for russian, german, etc. and not for spanish (400 million of people). There is a lot of people trying, for free, to explain how great is EvE, how far in the mmo "culture" it is, etc. to spanish community, but people, including friends, keep going to inferior mmos where translations are done (WoW, AoC, WAR, etc.).

You don't know how hard is to get enough people to make an alliance and hold space when our community is like 500 scattered players.

It's like a lost war, and CCP doesen't help either.

Work with us or it's going to be the time to give a call and stop promoting EvE in markets where CCP doesen't care about.

Hi Caedmon!Welcome, and thanks for you reply.I understand CCP's position, but I'm with Disteeler here: It's really intriguing why CCP is so slow about such a trivial aspect of the game. Other companies not only have translated clients, they run also whole translated sites, like Blizzard with WOW, to name one. (I know that CCP is much smaller than Blizzard, but it really is not that great of a job.)

We really like Eve to grow. I'd love to see more Spanish players. But without a localized client (and at least, one Spanish forum), we have a hard time convincing friends to play the game.

I've taken part in some community translation projects (for example, the translation of netvibes.com) so this is nothing new to me. (I even gave some advise to the guys at Netvibes, since I know its founder.)I know that CCP had problems translating the client to Russian.Curiously, two of the three languages you mention use a completely different scrip (Russian -cyrillic, and Chinese -simplified or traditional chinese) though are very difficult to localize.

What we are talking about here are western languages, which are easier to translate to/from english. Provided that the client support ISO 8859-1, you have everything there, specially a helpful community. With just a native language speaker to coordinate the translation I estimate that you can have a translation to Spanish in less than a week.

Geez! I can even offer myself to coordinate the translation!

You can have an unnoficial translated client which you can then send to a translation service to verify. After all we, the players, have a better understanding of what we want translated in this game than an outsider non-player translator (look how the Russian community was very vocal about the Russian translation. Those guys know exactly what they want, and they knew the translator didn't make a good job.)

I don't want to put preassure on you, but really, this is nothing difficult. You just need to provide the community with a .po file and let us do the work. Put some basic guidelines (use an informal voice, don't translate proper names, etc.), name a coordinator and you'll have a translation in no-time. Then, if you want, send it to a certified translator or a translation service for verification and you'll have a translated client to test. That's it. And if you already started other translation projects, you probably have everything in place to do that (you'll only need to open a Spanish forum to help Spanish players, that's it.)

I hope you realize that we criticize CCP on this subject because we really want Eve to have more player... :-)

Thanks for the welcome Dmian and thanks both of you for your suggestions!

From the outside localization might seem like a trivial thing but for a MMO game with over 2 million words and new content released regularly it is anything but simple. We have worked with volunteers on translating the client in the past and while we love the fact that the community is so enthusiastic we found the results to be patchy. Volunteers don't have professional tools with things like translation memory, in-built glossary and style guides which help to ensure quality and consistency.

Obviously we want more Spanish speaking players. Heck, we want everyone in the world to play EVE! But we have learnt lessons from what happened with Russian. The client translation was not good enough and it has understandably annoyed the Russian speaking EVE community. We are working on correcting this and this has to be our priority at the moment.

The future is far from decided on EVE localization and senior people at CCP are working on making the necessary business decisions. Spanish is definitely on the list of languages that are being considered but there are no hints as to when it might happen yet.

In the meantime, if you want to contribute to the Spanish speaking EVE community, I would encourage you to get involved in the Spanish language fansites here: http://www.eve-online.com/community/fansites.asp or to volunteer as Spanish language bug-hunters.

Also, if you were thinking of coming to FanFest we'll be doing a presentation called Localization Mythbusting, to give the community an insight into how localization works at CCP.

Well, Thanks for your answer again. I truly understand what you mean. I've been there and know exactly how difficult it is with a dispersed community. I really don't want to trivialize the translators work (heck!, I'm friend of the official translators at my current job! ). And I know you are a dynamic company and are constantly adding content. I can visualize how much work you have ahead. But I need to say something about something you mentioned: you don't need to translate everything. Most of the proper names should not be translated, and that includes most of the items in the database. So those 2 million word would be probably less, I guess.If I'm not wrong, the bulk of the work is on the tutorials, the missions and the interface. Either way, it's still a very lengthy and exhaustive job.

I've been thinking about this subject since I wrote my post. And I found one question that it's very difficult to answer: does you translate for the current Spanish players (mostly bilingual and used to the English names) or do you translate for non-bilingual players, not used to the English names and maybe needed of a lengthier, deeper translation?Those are really difficult questions to answer.

I still believe that it'll be more difficult of a job for a professional translator than for a player. The professional translator might do a more professional job, but to truly satisfy the players of this complex game, he/she must have a deep knowledge of it. Or have tremendous feedback from players. Because you risk the chance of making the same errors that the translator did with the russian version. I think it'll take a long time for a translator to produce a decent translation that the Eve player can accept. I see this every day: while some of the people doing research at my job (who are bilingual Spanish-English speakers) don't do as good and as polished translations as the official translators, they produce the translations faster than the translators, since they know the exact context of every word, something a translator needs to find out for each case. Of course, a translator approval is needed for every paper to be published, but when we send the translations to be done entirely by the translators, it tipically takes more time to be completed (and that doesn't mean that the translator is bad at his/her job. It's just that they need to find out what the author meant when he/she wrote the paper.)That's why I insisted that you should use the players help for this job.

Anyways, I know I'll have to wait. But I still have faith in you. You have proved me time and time again that you are a great company, and that you always take care of your customers. Thanks.

About the Spanish sites: the problem with those is that, since most of the Spanish players are bilingual, we always revert to the more complete and dynamic English written sites. It's a pitty.

I can't assist to the FanFest, but I do hope to have a report of the presentation.

Originally by:CCP CaedmonThanks for the welcome Dmian and thanks both of you for your suggestions!

From the outside localization might seem like a trivial thing but for a MMO game with over 2 million words and new content released regularly it is anything but simple. We have worked with volunteers on translating the client in the past and while we love the fact that the community is so enthusiastic we found the results to be patchy. Volunteers don't have professional tools with things like translation memory, in-built glossary and style guides which help to ensure quality and consistency.

Hello Caedmon, you are right!

In the past, I did professional translations from english to spanish for a USA software company whose product I used to sell in Mèxico and indeed translation is not simple nor easy. It seems a simple task from a bird eye point of view, but at the time to cope with it well, details come out. It`s not only the words but also the best word to use that conveys the true meaning of what is being said and very important too, is the fact that words are different sizes in spanish. For example in EVE GUI, "asteroid belt" would translate to "cinturòn de asteroides". 13 spaces in English versus 21 in Spanish. We had all the tools needed to change the software user`s interface because we had to change also the size of the pulldown menus. If the spanish pulldown menu was longer, we had to go into the software`s GUI and modify accordingly.

With over two million words plus new content added often, a CCP spanish translation team director or at least a supervising position is needed permanently or for the duration of the translation. Obviously it cannot be changed by just about about any user that grabs a text list of English words. Popular Spanish differs from country to country, some words in Spain are not common in Mèxico or Argentina, not that these are not known, only that are not commonly used. Yeah, some computer slang is now universal, ie; the word "chat", but these are exceptions not rules.

To translate EVE GUI is no simple task, that is evident, but I have met several EVE enthusiast that ask -in game- the meaning of this or that word. This is not often, but happens. Spanish speakers in the world amount for a very good sized market, no need to talk about it, surely CCP knows about it. The computer literate Spanish market is growing by leaps and bounds and EVE has proven to be a good place to be at, but because it`s not a simple shooters game localization is important.

I do hope Spanish localization matter is taken by CCP, being the size of the task a two million word job, sooner than later.